I think I set a new record on Martian for "biggest comeback ever". You start in the mid-section and in the head. My town hall in the head section was perfectly viable and started to grow nicely. My town hall in the mid-section also started to grow, but was surrounded by large bases of the same AI player on both sides, so it was very tempted to crush me as soon as it could, and it did. Maybe if I replayed it I could have made a castle ASAP and staved off defeat in the mid-section and maybe had a very different overall experience with the map.

Nevertheless, I pushed on with just my good base in the head of the map. The AI in the middle, meanwhile, started growing quickly and got much, much bigger than me. At one point, I was tied for 2nd place in territory, but player 1 was *four to five* times my size.

By this point, I assumed the map was lost, but I decided to keep playing anyway. I tried a somewhat desperate gamble. I had 2x L1 grunts and 1x L2 spearman and was saving up cash, maybe 5-7 gold per turn. I would definitely lose if I didn't do something. So I tried upgrading to 1x L1 grunt and 1x L3 knight, *losing* cash each turn. My small opponent in the head area of the map could have easily stopped me if he had decided to attack me, but as is often the case, the enemy AI retreats from a territory with a larger troop type when it can retreat and when it can't immediately cause starvation. So my L1 grunt was able to claim some of his territory slowly and not get killed, while my L3 knight moved down the neck to hope for an opportunity to starve the big player.

Sure enough, the AI in 1st place made a massive push up one of the martian's arms, and I was able to use all my cash to make 3x L1 troops and starve out his army. He immediately killed my L1 troops, but now the arm he just took was covered in trees. A few turns later, he made another grab to take over the other arm, and this time, I was able to starve his forces with just a L3 knight and a L1 grunt protected by the knight, so he couldn't immediately jump back into the arm.

At the peak, the largest player was ~4-5x larger than me. And now after the 2nd starvation attack, he was still at least 2.5-3x as large as me *and* by this point there was virtually nothing left of any other players. But the tide had turned and I was able to make steady progress eating up the arm that his main force couldn't reach and that was filled with lots of trees. By the time I had claimed an arm, the AI offered surrender.